Unmaking capitalism through community empowerment: Findings from Italian agricultural experiences

Abstract

Capitalism – in the theorizations of sustainability transformation – has been largely taken for granted for its misleadingly assumed stability and homogeneity, thus limiting the scope for defining alternative futures, policy options and strategies for transformative change. Theorizations regarding sustainable transformative pathways have often overshadowed a nuanced landscape of normative and ontological pluralism thus contributing to generating techno-centric and top-down responses to issues such as access to food, farmers' control over the food-chain and global environmental change. The expansion of capital, under a mechanism of production-reproduction, with a constant attempt to subsume different forms of production into the global market, generates manifold temporal frictions that, on the one hand, contribute to the consolidation of the capitalist model and, on the other hand, give rise to conflicting elements and re-orientation of modernity in a process of “unmaking” of capitalism. This article, drawing upon empirical work conducted in Northern Italy, presents two experiences emerging from the scenario of local food networks, namely the “C’è Campo” Participatory Guarantee System and the “Ortazzo” Community Supported Agriculture project. These show elements and mechanisms of local community empowerment for unmaking capitalism from the inside, as steps for a sustainable and bottom-up transformation which do not necessarily imply the generation of socio-economic novelties ex-nihilo. The “conventionalization” of organic agriculture has pushed those actors who participate in local food networks to reconfigure their self-regulation towards a “bottom-up” approach driven by the adoption of PGS or CSA instruments as an attempt to secure or reacquire control over the market and the construction of quality. Convivial tools, in particular, are crucial for understanding - and finding responses to - the social, economic, cultural and environmental crisis that contemporary society is now facing.